


An Abnormal Defect of Moral Control

by angelica_church_schuyler



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, Eddie Kaspbrak Has ADHD, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 17:29:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20746031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_church_schuyler/pseuds/angelica_church_schuyler
Summary: Eddie needs routine. He always has. He needs structure, a plan, has to know exactly how his day will go or he’ll end up totally lost. Killing an alien clown, confronting your mother for the first time, and stopping all of your medications at once kinda throws that out of wack.Or, Eddie stops taking all of those fake medications, but it turns out one was real.





	An Abnormal Defect of Moral Control

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this Tumblr post.](https://stansbooty.tumblr.com/post/187694180204/kid-eddie-in-it-chapter-2-acts-like-when-he)
> 
> Title is from a lecture by Sir George Frederic Still in 1902, describing children with what we would now call ADHD.

Eddie needs routine. He always has. He needs structure, a plan, has to know exactly how his day will go or he’ll end up totally lost.

He wakes up at the same time every morning. He takes his meds at the same time every day (with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, before bed). He goes to school (the Barrens or the arcade or the clubhouse on the weekend), goes home, and does his homework. Dinner, more meds, bed, repeat. He has a wall planner on his bedroom wall and a diary in his backpack.

He needs routine. He needs structure. He needs _normality._

Killing an alien clown thing and finding out everything you thought you knew about the world and about yourself throws that out of whack a little bit.

He still has his routine, minus the medication, although he hasn’t turned the alarm on his watch off. He’s always been bad at telling time, and having those little beeps coming from his watch helps him figure out how much time has gone by. He still goes to school and to the Barrens and to the clubhouse. He still has his wall planner and his diary. 

They don’t help as much as they used to.

He keeps forgetting to write down the things he needs to write down. Teachers give the class homework and due dates and he tells himself he’ll remember, and then he calls up Stan in a panic a day before the deadline because he can’t remember when it’s due and he can’t even remember what the assignment is because he forgot to put it on his planner and he’s so _forgetful_ and _stupid_ and he swears adolescence has made him so much lazier than he used to be.

Eddie had never really _liked_ school. It was full of bullies and germs and god knows what kind of diseases, but he’d always been good at it. The academic side, that is, he was totally awful at the social side of...well, anything. He interrupted people and didn’t always pick up on social cues, and sometimes it took him a couple seconds to process what people were saying, and his teachers and his mom always said he never looked like he was listening. He went off on tangents and no one understood how he had gotten from their topic of conversation to whatever the hell he was talking about now and he had a really bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth and sometimes he accidentally swore at teachers.

Wait, what he was he thinking about? Oh, school, right.

Anyway, he was terrible at socialising, but he had always been good at schoolwork. He was naturally smart (maybe it was kinda bragging to say that, but it was true) and he’d always gotten good grades. His grades have been dropping and his Mom is upset and he can’t figure out _why._ He sits in his usual spot in English class, second row, by the window, Richie to his right and Bev behind him, and he tries so fucking hard to listen and he does listen, he really does, for a while, and then it’s like his brain just...checks out. Like it’s taken in too much too quickly, it’s overloading and it can’t store any more facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald so let’s just stare out the window and think about God knows what and tap this pen against the desk and get yelled at for not paying attention again even though you’re trying to.  
Eddie thinks that teachers must hate people who don’t pay attention. They must hate kids who look around the classroom during tests and fidget constantly and can’t sit still and they’ve already told him they really, _really_ hate smart kids who aren’t “fulfilling their potential” so that must mean they hate Eddie and he doesn’t know how to deal with that other than by going home and yelling and throwing pillows around his room and wondering what the actual fucking _fuck_ is wrong with him.

And it’s ironic, in a cruel way, because it’s not like his brain doesn’t _function._ It just doesn’t function the way he wants it to. He can spend hours and hours on one particular thing if his brain latches on to it, and it’s impossible to tear himself away. Part of him hates it, because it’s frustrating and it’s never something he’ll need or even want to be focusing on (he’s got a project on the Atlantic slave trade due in, like, six hours but he can’t stop thinking about ancient Egyptian mythology), but part of him likes the feeling of actually _focusing._  
It’s basically the only time his mind isn’t going a trillion miles per hour. Usually it feels like there’s a hamster wheel in his head, except the hamster has super speed and it’s going at the speed of light and there’s also like twelve other hamsters all running at the same time and he doesn’t know which one to focus on and it’s so frustrating because sometimes he just wants his brain to shut up but it won’t it just fucking won’t, even when he tries to sleep and his routine dictates that he should be asleep right now so that he can get at least eight hours but the stupid fucking hamsters won’t stop running in place and his stupid fucking brain refuses to just _SHUT THE FUCK UP._

The clubhouse is the best place in the whole fucking world. It’s quiet, usually, and it’s insulated and cool and relatively peaceful, and when he’s the only one there he can turn on Ben’s cassette player and lie in the hammock (by himself!) and relax for once, and even when the others are there they listen when he gets overwhelmed and asks them to be quieter and they don’t ask questions or judge him when he needs to leave for a few minutes because it’s too crowded.  
He’s down there with Richie one day and they’re on the hammock, trying to be as close to and as far away from each other as possible, waiting for the others, and he can’t stop running the nails on his thumb over his fingers and the palm of his hand, hard enough that he feels it but not hard enough to leave a mark. It’s too quiet down here sometimes, and too still, and usually he can just get up and put something in Ben’s cassette player and that solves that problem, but Ben’s not here and neither is the cassette player and things are quiet and still. He brought a book but he can’t concentrate on it, all he can do is read the first two paragraphs over and over again and think about how many words are on this page and just thinking about it is kind of exhausting.  
“Hey,” Richie’s voice pulls him out of his stupor. “You okay?”  
“Yeah,” Eddie says, maybe a little too defensively. He can’t stop thinking about how close together they are. “Why?”  
Richie shrugs. “You were being really quiet. Usually when you’re not yelling at me it’s a bad sign. And you look like you’re gonna claw all the skin off your hands, what’s up with that?  
Eddie rolled his eyes and went back to staring at his book.  
“Hey, Eds...Eddie Spaghetti...Eddie...Eds...hey, Eds…”  
Eddie snapped his book shut. “What?”  
Richie stared at him for a second, looking far too serious for Eddie’s liking. “Seriously, man, what’s up?”  
Fuck it. Richie would think he was crazy and weird, but Richie already thought that. “Look, this sounds fucking crazy, I know, and I know it’s weird, and-and stupid and just-just _weird_ but it's just too...calm...down here. Right now, at least, it isn’t always, but right now it is and, I don’t know, it’s just kinda annoying me.”  
He braced himself for a laugh, for Richie to tell him that yeah, that _is_ weird, what the hell? Doesn’t Eddie _like_ quiet? Eddie’s always telling Richie to shut the fuck up, why are you suddenly going insane because the clubhouse is too fucking _calm?_  
Instead, Richie smiled, and Eddie tried not to think about how he had a really nice smile. “Yeah, I get that all the time.”  
“Really?”  
Richie nodded. “Yeah. I usually just listen to music. Whoever invented Walkmans is my hero.”  
Eddie frowned. “Shit, I don’t have a Walkman. And there’s no way my mom would get me one.”  
“I just got a new one,” said Richie. “You can have my old one, if you want. It still works.”

It did work. It really, _actually_ worked, at least a little. Richie’s old Walkman wasn’t exactly good as new, but it worked pretty well, and Richie had given him some tapes too, an old Bruce Springsteen album, a very old Buddy Holly album, and the Footloose soundtrack, and a pair of headphones, and it _worked._ Things still got too quiet sometimes and sometimes there were too many distractions but all he had to do was put on his headphones and it was so much better. Not perfect, but better.

That was all he wanted. Better.

His mind wanders a lot, even with the music, and he can’t stop, he can’t rein it in. It doesn’t even know where it’s going, it just goes.  
...connected from him, a totally different entity.  
There’s a fuzzy blank space in his immediate short-term memory where the first half of that sentence used to be, and he knows he’s about to spend 5 minutes using up all his concentration trying to get it back, but he knows it’s useless, it’s gone, it’s floated away like a big red helium balloon and he’ll never get it back.

Anyway, his overactive, wandering mind leads to a lot of overthinking, which in turn leads to a lot of anxiety, which in turn leads him to a realisation, the root of all of his problems:  
Brain damage.  
And/or a slow descent into insanity.  
Probably. Maybe. The thing is, he’s pretty sure he must’ve gotten at least one concussion during that whole thing with the clown, and untreated concussions can lead to some _serious shit_, like brain damage and comas and death. He thinks he read that somewhere.  
Brain damage would account for _everything_, concentration problems, memory issues, he even feels like he’s clumsier than he used to be and that is _definitely_ a sign of brain damage.  
So he knows what’s wrong (probably), but he has no idea how to fix it. He doesn’t want to talk to his mother because she’d freak out. And he doesn’t really trust her, anyway. He used to put up with her worrying, back when he thought she was doing what was best for him. He’s not so sure anymore.  
Theoretically, he could go to a doctor on his own (he’s 14, almost 15, he’s not a little kid), but he couldn’t trust them not to go straight to his mom. He knew they weren’t supposed to, with doctor-patient confidentiality and all that, but doctors also weren’t supposed to give kids fake medicine to enable their crazy mothers so who even knew anymore.  
He didn’t think his friends would be much help. Stan might have some ideas, but he’d probably just say he needed to talk to a doctor and Eddie would have to explain why he couldn’t and Stan would say that it was stupid and Eddie would say that it wasn’t and it would be a whole thing. 

One morning, when he’s feeling restless and irritable for no reason and feels like he has to leave the house right now right this second immediately or he’ll go insane, he goes to the quarry. It’s just past 8am, according to his watch (he could’ve sworn it was later), and he assumes it’s too early for the others to be there, so he just sits there, alone with his rocks and his thoughts because he left his Walkman at home, and then Mike’s there and Eddie doesn’t have time to dry his eyes before Mike’s sitting down next to him with that stupid kind concerned look Mike gets when people are sad.  
“Hey,” he says. He sounds normal, like he’s just saying hi, but there’s that hint of softness in his voice, as if he’s trying to let you know that everything’s fine and you can talk if you want to but if you don’t that’s cool too. 

Eddie takes one look at him and bursts into hysterical tears.

Once he’s able to speak somewhat coherently again, he tells Mike everything, about how he can’t focus and he can’t remember things and he can’t tell time, but he’s never been able to tell time, and he can’t stop thinking and he can’t sleep and he fidgets all the time and-and-and he thinks he has brain damage and Mike stares at him for a second.  
“You don’t have brain damage.”  
Eddie sniffs. “I might.”  
“You don’t.”  
Eddie mumbles something that he hopes Mike doesn’t catch, and Mike keeps going.  
“This all started after the clown? This stuff never happened to you before?”  
Eddie starts to say no, but that would be a lie. He’s never thought about it before, but Mike’s got a point. This stuff _did_ happen to him before, ever since he was a little kid, but he’d gotten better so he thought it was just being a little kid.  
“Oh my god, I don’t have brain damage.”  
Mike smiles, and puts his arm around Eddie’s shoulders. “Told ya.”  
“I just thought that’s what kids were like. And then you get older and you grow out of it. And then...and then it gets worse again ”  
Mike’s brow furrows. “Well, that didn’t happen to me, but maybe it does happen.”  
“Hm.” _So in that case,_ Eddie thinks but doesn’t say, _what the fuck is wrong with me?_ “What am I gonna do?”  
Mike pauses and shrugs. “I think...don’t freak out, but I think seeing a doctor would help.”  
“I don’t want -”  
“I know you don't, let me finish. So, I think we’ll just have to deal with it ourselves. Figure out ways to help you cope, you know?”  
_We_, Eddie thinks. _Us. Together._

Eddie was such an idiot. He was so, so stupid to ever imagine that he might have to deal with this, or anything else, on his own. Of course not. He was a part of a group, a collective, a chain of seven. When there’s a chip in one link, the other six keep it together.

And it gets better.

Not perfect, but better.

He thinks that life is pretty great, sometimes, like when he still manages to keep his grades up and he can hand his mom a report card full of A’s and B’s (and one C and one D, but mostly A’s and B’s), or when he spends hours making mixtapes, listening to the radio and waiting for the right song and rushing to press RECORD at the right time.  
Like when Mike is always there for him, just on the other end of the phone, to tell him that he’s stronger than he thinks he is. When he spends hours with Ben fixing up the clubhouse, Eddie figuring out the parts that are the most dangerous, the two of them brainstorming ideas on what to do about it, and Ben doing the actual fixing while Eddie sits and watches and pretends to be helping.  
Like when they’re in the clubhouse and Stan is rolling his eyes but he’s smiling and Bev is giggling from the hammock because Richie’s in the middle of the room singing along to _Born To Run_, and he’s loud and off-key and obnoxious and replaces ‘Wendy’ with ‘Eddie’ and Eddie laughs, because it’s a joke, and Eddie always laughs at Richie’s jokes, but there’s a small, quiet, guilty part of him that hopes it isn’t a joke, and thinks that maybe together they can live with the sadness, and maybe he loves this stupid boy with all of the madness in his soul. And there’s a _lot_ of madness in it.

Eddie needs routine. He always has. He needs structure, he needs plans, and he needs his friends, or he’ll end up totally lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I hope you liked this! I hope all of this actually made sense to anyone except me, and I'm sorry for all of the run on sentences but that's just how my ADHD brain is. Thanks for reading xx


End file.
